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Is it possible to replace the internal drive ? Will it take a regular 2.5" 1TB drive from Western Digital ? I mean this both physically (as a comment in the other question says the original drive has slightly different dimensions than usual, I assume non-slim, 2.5" drive) and w.r.t. firmware of the SATA/Firewire converter accepting regular drive.
Is this a good question?
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Sadly Western Digital uses a custom drive in this series of drives. The drives logic board also holds the FireWire & USB interface logic as well.
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These predate that - USB3 Micro drives have the USB on the PCB. These use a bridge board, but a lot of them have encrypted PCBs where if the PCB dies you can't see the data but as long as you source another PCB from the same drive series, they unlock. It's a master key, they aren't all unique.
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I wouldn't bother :-(. These use a bridge board but in the mid 2000s WD added PCB encryption. If the PCB ever fails (and it will at some point, the PCBs suck and are a common failure point), you will need to format the drive and throw your data out, repair it at the board level or source the same drive as the dead one for the PCB so you can copy the data off of the drive.
Get a NVMe SSD (1-2TB), a enclosure like the UGREEN CM642 or CM850 and run that - I love WD for their drives (especially the Black and HGST drives, especially the NAS/Server drives), but I don't love their EHDs due to the USB3 drives putting the POINT OF FAILURE ON THE PCB and encrypting the drive with a master key requiring the WD PCB. 2015+ ones (when they soldered the USB port to the PCB) added unique encryption keys, anything prior that shows blank has the generic AES key that was shared across that drive platform.
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